Negotiating a little girl’s knickers down

Judging by his obsessive repetition of the phrase “little girl”, and his fixation on getting into their knickers (“I like this issue”), Ross Coulthart may raise some eyebrows when his interview with me eventually goes out on Australia’s 60 Minutes TV programme. Viewers could be forgiven for thinking he was the one who “wants adults to be allowed to have sexual intercourse with children” – itself an expression rammed down my throat with rapacious insistence dozens of times in different variations, heedless of my protests.

As for the word “consent”, there were over 50 mentions. I know because I made my own audio recording. Trigger warning: heretics may find this induces anger and nausea!

Coulthart trained as a lawyer, according to his online profile. While his emotive use of language was pure tabloid rabble rousing, and the lurid conspiracy theory at the heart of his purported investigation – an alleged Establishment cover-up of “VIP paedophilia” – was just evidence-free speculation, there is also a lawyerly forensic focus to his style that did actually succeed in pinning down one issue worth exploring a bit further here.

We think we know all the arguments over consent because we have been over it a million times. Usually, though, our frame of reference as MAPs is to see consent in a broader context. We know that children who supposedly “cannot consent” to sex often in practice do just that; we know that widely varying ages of consent apply in different legislatures and that where the age is lower there is no discernible problem compared to where it is higher. We also feel that the quality of the relationship is what counts, not the legalistic formality of consent, for which there is no requirement in many non-sexual contexts, even hazardous ones.

I could go on, exploring this broad contextual background. That is precisely what Coulthart was determined to stop me doing. His strategy was to home in, myopically, on a single detail from my book Paedophilia: The Radical Case. As quite a few heretics here will know, there is a whole chapter on consent (Ch. 8). But my interviewer chose to take just three paragraphs from a different chapter (Ch. 3) and focus on less than three sentences cherry-picked from them. These are the paragraphs:

Take, for instance, the little girl who will happily smile at and chatter to a “nice man”, and will sit across his knee with her legs apart.If the man is susceptible to paedophilic feelings, he may be tempted to see this as “seductive” behaviour, when the child in fact may be quite unaware of the way he is interpreting events – she may be exhibiting, in the traditional sense, all the “innocence” of childhood (even though, quite independently, she may also be highly sexed and know how to give herself an orgasm).

The usual assumption is that this potential for misunderstanding is bound to be a bad thing, but this is not necessarily so. Typically, in the formation of a paedophilic attachment, as in those between adults, the actual behaviour of either party develops not precipitately, but step by step: each stage is “negotiated” by hints and signals, verbal and non-verbal, by which each indicates to the other what is acceptable and what is not.

In our example, the man might start by saying what pretty knickers the girl was wearing, and he would be far more likely to proceed to the next stage of negotiation if she seemed pleased by the remark than if she coloured up and closed her legs. Despite “being wrong” about her intentional sexual seductiveness, he might never-the-less be right in gradually discovering that the child is one who likes to be cuddled and who thinks it great fun to be tickled under her knickers.

The bold parts in the above are plain text in the original. I have emphasised them as these are the bits Coulthart concentrated on, to the exclusion of all else.

I had agreed to this interview simply to defend my “VIP” friends Peter Righton and Charles Napier from some outrageous allegations recently made against them. I had no reason to suppose the programme would be interested in my view of consent. I had no wish to avoid the issue, though, so when it was raised in the first few minutes I did not duck away from it, emphasising that the practice is more important than the theory, giving the example of Theo Sandfort’s Netherlands-based research demonstrating that children can consent without harm, and even with beneficial outcomes. I imagine they’ll cut this section out!

When he mentioned the “little girl” scenario in my book, he said:

Nowhere in that paragraph do you even talk about express consent. You talk about implied consent from that poor little girl.

He was right.

Ignoring the blatantly emotive and misleading “poor little girl” rhetoric, I felt the most urgent need was to drag my own 20th century language into the 21st with a nod to the contemporary debate on express or affirmative consent in the context of adult relationships. There was this exchange:

Me: In the light of the debate that has taken place in recent years on that aspect of consent, I am persuaded that maybe, yes, one does need to be a little bit more affirmative than as stated in the text just quoted.

Coulthart:So you no longer believe that implied consent from a child is enough?

Me: It may not be but I have not reviewed…that particular scenario for some time; in the light of the debate on affirmative consent I think I would need to think about that again. But most of all, where I need to think again, is with regard to what happens many years after, because people can be traumatised retrospectively.

It was doubtless a disappointing reply for him. He had hoped for something more scandalous, and tried to provoke it with a further resort to emotive language:

Coulthart: You’ll appreciate that the scenario you describe, of a little girl on a man’s knee, sounds just like the creepy, pederastic child molester scenario of every worst nightmare?

Me: No, the worst nightmare is far worse than that. The worst nightmare is a child being abducted at knifepoint and raped and killed.

Coulthart: But fundamentally, isn’t this at the heart of the problem, that you have men who want to have sex with children, telling themselves that children are consenting when transparently that child is not consenting and couldn’t possibly consent?

Me: No, I don’t think so. It all depends on how the child feels at the time and whether you’ve got an atmosphere… of hysteria. The way it’s being cranked up is making things worse for children because we are now getting to the stage where children themselves are being accused of being sex offenders. I now see, there’s a police report recently… even four year olds are being taken to task in schools for being “sex offenders”.

This wasn’t what he wanted to hear either so he soon moved on, to the VIP allegations. And there the consent question might have ended. Once we had been over the Righton/Napier stuff, Coulthart said “OK, we’ll stop there”.

With the camera off, as I thought, my immediate response was to say to him “You don’t really believe all that crap, do you?” He admitted some of the allegations were “questionable” and we continued for a while with what I took to be a private conversation between the two of us, including him asking whether I really believed some of the things I had been saying. I was some way into answering before I realised the cameras were still rolling, and then I felt I needed to keep going because it was became quite confrontational and I didn’t want to back down.

So it seems his “OK, we’ll stop there” instruction to the film crew had basically been just a trick to catch me off guard. I shouldn’t have fallen for it, but I am glad we had the exchange that followed, even though it felt sterile and ridiculous at the time on account of its narrowness.

His tactic was to home in very tightly on a single phrase from my book – “each stage is ‘negotiated’ by hints and signals” – and enquire precisely what I meant. What would it take, he demanded to know, for a paedophile to be satisfied that he had the “little girl’s consent to have sex with her”? What words would do it? Or might non-verbal “hints and signals” be enough? If so, what examples could I give? Would I paint a picture for him of how this scenario of the little girl on my knee would play out, leading to “sex” with her? Imagine her, he said, she’s sitting there right now, on your lap. How do you “negotiate” – negotiate! – for this little girl to have sex with you? How do you really know she is consenting?

My answer, broadly, was that the benignly disposed adult will be satisfied with nothing less than an enthusiastic response, whether verbal or not. He will be keen to have the child’s approval and will stop in the face of silence or signs of anxiety. I did not make the mistake of saying clearly expressed verbal consent would be the definitive green light because I don’t think it is. It may work for adults and older minors – I am thinking of the valuable comments made here by “A” – but even verbal assent may be given fearfully. It may mask a lack of real enthusiasm. Any sensitive child-lover can tell when consent is really being given. Also, I pointed out, the consent concept implies one-way traffic: what about kids who take the initiative?

As for the insensitive or manipulative adult, he will run the risk of a later complaint by the child and a criminal conviction. I have never advocated taking away the protection of the criminal law, and neither did the Paedophile Information Exchange.

My use of the word “negotiate” in the book was a tricky one to negotiate in the interview itself. I just ignored Coulthart’s scornful emphasis on the term. Justifying my use of the word would have been tough. I would have insisted he was wrenching it out of context except that I could not remember the context of a passage written 35 years ago! Re-reading it since, I realise I was deliberately being provocative. It is a word from the world of business and diplomacy. We think of hard-nosed bargaining between experienced players of a tricky game, in which they use all sorts of cunning ruses to get what they want at the other party’s expense. Going beyond the cliché of the hapless, helpless, outmanoeuvred child, though, my book revealed children as potentially skilful and successful negotiators: a “little girl” is often notoriously able to wrap her father around her little finger, as the saying goes. In the end, negotiation is simply about saying what you want, what you like doing, or might like to try out, and agreeing about it. That’s not so hard.

So I believe my argument stood up to intense close scrutiny but I doubt many viewers will see it that way: Coulthart’s emotive language, combined with his softly-spoken air of confident authority will guarantee that – along with editing out my stronger points!

My emphasis on showing real enthusiasm rather than verbal agreement turns out, somewhat to my surprise, to be pretty much what is said by proponents of affirmative consent. But opponents claim that in about a quarter of all states in the US, sex isn’t legal without positive agreement, and “Should we really put people in jail for not doing what most people aren’t doing?” Difficulties identified in a proposed new legal code in the US, are that it is said to consider consent meaningless “under conditions of unequal power” (between adults, that is) and that it would shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused.

TRANSLATION CUP RUNNETH OVER

Heretic TOC is delighted to report that there were more than enough volunteers for the task of producing a transcript of my interview with Testimony Films, which was used as the basis for David Kennerly’s film A Decent Life. These volunteers, who each transcribed one or more sections of the 11-part film on YouTube, all completed their work very quickly. Many thanks to each of them for their sterling work!

The project was undertaken following an offer to translate the film into French. This was itself a very generous voluntary gesture by an enthusiast, to whom I again extend my thanks. I am sure David will concur, as I trust will other heretics here who have seen his excellent film.

After all the transcription tasks had been allotted, another volunteer turned up. I found myself thinking: Great, how best to make good use of this wonderful willingness to help? One other task to which more than one person could contribute would be making a subject index of all the Heretic TOC blogs so far. I find I often need to refer back to previous blogs, and as they now number well over 150 the task of locating any particular theme I have written about previously is getting steadily harder and harder. The format for the index needs some careful initial thought, though. I hope to give it some attention very soon and then make a further announcement.

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Man, these guys are some f***ed up individuals, glad to see your bravery tom! Also, heard of the increase in child sex offenses? We need to talk about that more, it might actually be our first to tackle down a conventional argument 🙂

Good advice about false assumptions may make wrong conclusions. Good investigators, academics, and scientists (not mainstream monsters), “Assume nowt, question owt.” And if unclear or unsure then end on an interrogative?

>> Yeah it’s clear that his “sarah” has absolutely no experience with children at all except maybe her own offspring who she “protects” by keeping them locked in the basement. [TOC adds: Josh, readers will be able to see for themselves that this is merely speculative. Nevertheless, it is abusive and contrary to H-TOC policy. Sarah herself threw some pretty choice abuse at me in a post I trashed (along with assorted death threats against me received from others this week) so perhaps I do not need to be too apologetic to her at the moment. Your posts are usually OK, so on this occasion I’ll just ask you to be careful as to tone when responding to or about other posters here.]

(Deliberately misspelt) ” ‘NORWICH For SIAM’. Nickers Off Ready When I Come Home For Sexual Intercourse At Midnight.”

Bossy lady to timid butler, “James remove my blouse and dress. James take off my bra. James drop my knickers. And the next time I find you in my clothes – you’re fired!”

Paraphrase 1970s leading advice columnist (sadly now PC-cowed Agony Aunt), Virginia/Virgin for short but not for long Ironside, “On this issue (benign paedophilia) more than 70% of women respondents say they feel no-ill-effects from such psuedo-consenting childhood sexual contacts. And my advice is, your feelings are your own. Don’t let others tell you how you SHOULD feel!”

Sooo many truths about proactive preteens, tweens, and pubertals now PC untold unreported since the 19Hateys Fascist Market Hag Thatcher’s neo-Victorian wall went up. Not least in her 19Hateys Axis of Pure Evil with the Oz alien ‘Murdark’, infecting all other media, whose dumb-down blinds came down – ongoing unchecked.

Quote true Brit, straight-Beeb broadcaster, the late great Loli-lurvin’ ped John Peel, last interview last lines, Indie On Sunday 29 Aug ’04: “Rupert Murdoch has destroyed most of what was good about this country!”

One of the “anti-sex bigots” named in the white-on-black panel at the end of your links is Julie Bindel, who contacted me last year asking if she could interview me for the Sunday Times. I emailed back saying she was the last person on earth I would want to be interviewed by. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, however – these anti-sex types are not necessarily consistent on the consent thing! – making passes at me for months until she finally had her wicked way when we met at a Mayfair restaurant. It was a surprisingly pleasant encounter, but more about that some other time…

I just read this commentary about sex workers and the anti sex crowd not allowing them or their partners to consent. The arguments are also very similar to why we cannot have underage partners and I suspect the reason is the same. They do not like sex and will stop is where ever and when ever they can.

That’s how restrictions against mutually consensual sexual contact are justified within the context of a supposed democracy, Gordon. Sexual activity under certain conditions that offend the moralizing sensibilities of the public are criminalized on the basis of emotionally-derived, absolutist assumptions that can in no way be scientifically valid. Those women who choose to earn money via the sex work vocation are alleged to not actually be entering the profession by choice, as the anti pundits will claim they’re so desperate due to their destitute financial circumstances that “it’s not really a choice after all.” In accordance with this, their clientele are demonized as selfish, vicious individuals who cannot possibly think of their hired companion to be anything more than a mere object to “use and abuse” and who “take advantage of their impoverished circumstances.” As if these types of scenarios are typical of the situations of both sex workers and their clients. People think of these horrific stereotypes whenever the subject of sex work is broached, just as so many people automatically think of sweat shop conditions whenever the topic of child labor is broached. They consider themselves to be “protecting” women from “exploitation” (the famous nebulous euphemism) by doing this. Good intentions are always the rationale of the pundit who creates destructive measures that limit freedom of choice, which is the real reason behind such moralistically based laws.

As you noted, a similar type of rationale is applied towards underagers and sexual activity.

Whenever i am confronted with questions regarding “how can you be sure the child is consenting” i just turn it around on them.
Talking about something called “consent” which can be present or absent, must mean that we have an empirically verifiable process. (If something else is suggested, you of course can claim unfalsifiability)

I always ask: “If you claim children cannot consent, why don’t you just outline what a fictional wonder-child would do if it does the minimum to meet your criteria of consent and contrast it with children who just didn’t give enough consent”.

Which is of course a setup for the scientific method, making a hypothesis quantifiable.

If the answer is for example:
“If the child starts touching your genitals – this is enough consent”, you can of course reply with the classic: “So you think sex between children and adults is ok if the child starts touching your genitals?” and pin them down as the “bad” one. Or you can let the record show that indeed some children do and did touch adults genitals – of which many cases are no attempts to give consent and shouldn’t be categorized as such.

Defining consent with age is just legal formalism and isn’t oberservable as such, which begs the question.

There are many more ludicrous answers i have gotten – including criteria that most teenagers or even some adults couldn’t meet (and therefore could not give valid consent according to them).

Children are afraid of all adults besides their parents and maybe a nurturing grandparent. They will not assert themselves with a man who is not their father!!!! As an adult member of this community your job is to protect the children – from a distance. Young children have no interest in having contact with ugly old men. Yes, they are ticklish and yes, they are timmid and want to please some threatening old man who has them on their knee – they feel vulnerable and are in survival mode. As a child I was mortified if a man looked sideways at me – let alone touched me.

>”Children are afraid of all adults besides their parents and maybe a nurturing grandparent. ”

This just simply isn’t true.

My experience is that many children are initially shy but if you treat them with the same respect and interest, which adults tend to reserve for other adults, they quickly open up and, if anything, can get ‘over-excited’.

I’ve had several deep and long-lasting friendships with children to whom I’m not related. It’s often the shyest ones who most benefit from the company of an adult who respects them and takes them seriously. And, yes, I mean a ‘paedo’.

I know that my love has enriched the life of one little girl. Before you jump to conclusions – our friendship was absolutely chaste. However the love and respect I gave her sprung from a capacity to love and admire children that only a paedophile could have. A non-paedo would never have given her that love – as was well demonstrated by her father.

She was a shy, insecure 6 year old when I first met her – together we helped each other flourish and be happy – she became a quietly confident person and learnt from me what beautiful person she was.

>”Young children have no interest in having contact with ugly old men.”

Who says we’re all ‘old’?
Who says we’re all ‘ugly’?
Who says we’re all ‘men’?

Moreover children are not as obsessed with superficial beauty as adults – a child will respond more to warmth, sincerity and a stimulating personality.

>”…they are timmid…”

You clearly haven’t met or worked with some of the kids I’ve had to deal with!

”several deep and long-lasting friendships with children to whom I’m not related. It’s often the shyest ones who most benefit from the company of an adult who respects them and takes them seriously. And, yes, I mean a ‘paedo’.
I know that my love has enriched the life of one little girl. Before you jump to conclusions – our friendship was absolutely chaste.”
We’re getting to the point where it’s impossible for society to differentiate such concepts as ‘friendship’, ‘grooming’, ‘teaching’, ’empathy’, ‘love’, ‘ulterior motive’ with regard to adult-minor interactions. To all intents and purposes ‘friendship’ is banned in our modern world, because it’s immediately distrusted and shovelled into the all-pervading abuse dogma. The recent male nurse-child marriage story showed this, with some idiots (a minority thankfully) piping up that even this act of beauty was ‘creepy’ and psychologically bad for the child (who has somewhat bigger worries about what is ‘bad’ for her, namely leukemia).

Yeah it’s clear that his “sarah” has absolutely no experience with children at all except maybe her own offspring who she “protects” by keeping them locked in the basement.

[TOC adds: Josh, readers will be able to see for themselves that this is merely speculative. Nevertheless, it is abusive and contrary to H-TOC policy. Sarah herself threw some pretty choice abuse at me in a post I trashed (along with assorted death threats against me received from others this week) so perhaps I do not need to be too apologetic to her at the moment. Your posts are usually OK, so on this occasion I’ll just ask you to be careful as to tone when responding to or about other posters here.]

Children are individual people with different likes and personalities. Some are shy while some are very outgoing. I always wave at the children at work. The shy ones will always look away at not say anything and then there are those who will smile and wave back and ask me how I’m doing. Some will even try to have full conversations with me and start telling me about their day which I love the most.

I was a shy child who didn’t like to be touched but I was not like most other kids. The teachers only liked me because they didn’t have to deal with me like they did all the “bad” kids who’d run around and talk the whole time we were in class. But If I ever have a kid and they acted like I did in school, I’d probably try to get them help because like me it could mean they are having anxiety problems that could give them trouble later in life if not treated early. If a child isn’t asserting themselves in social situations it should be looked at as something potentially problematic and not merely as “good behavior.”

And I feared my own father more than any other adult. He never abused me but he was a very angry and stern parent. There were days he’d come home from work and I’d pretend to be asleep in order to avoid him.

At infant school, (1969) Ten of my fellow pupils were marched in from the playground where our Teacher / Headmistress then proceeded to castigate them severely. Being that I had been spending break-time on the other side of the school premises (where it was mostly girls), I didn’t know what they had done precisely that warranted them being made to hold their hands out for Miss Hall to thrash them, hard.

It was I that got the cruelest punishment though. To complete her admonishments, she turned back to face them and urged them; “why can’t you be more like John, he’s always so well behaved”. Oh how I begged the ground to open up and swallow me.

Children are afraid of all adults besides their parents and maybe a nurturing grandparent. They will not assert themselves with a man who is not their father!!!!

I understand that you’re very upset with MAPs due to all of the nasty and frankly very incorrect things you’ve heard about us in the media over the years, Sarah. But runaway emotions make it difficult to gain proper understanding. There are many outgoing children out there who are not afraid of unfamiliar adults, and this despite the fact that so many parents today shelter their kids to keep them wary of any adults who are not close relatives.

As an adult member of this community your job is to protect the children – from a distance.

I think the job of everyone in society is to seek out the truth of any given topic, as opposed to clinging to popular belief. And some of us feel that sheltering kids under the guise of “protecting” them doesn’t keep them safe, but exposes them to many types of dangers that result from enforced ignorance.

Young children have no interest in having contact with ugly old men. Yes, they are ticklish and yes, they are timmid and want to please some threatening old man who has them on their knee – they feel vulnerable and are in survival mode. As a child I was mortified if a man looked sideways at me – let alone touched me.

It honestly sounds to me, Sarah, that you are projecting your own timid and (I presume) sheltered nature as a child onto all children. You also presume that because you find older men ugly, that all children will. Due to my preferences, I find women in my age group to be ugly, but I fully understand that many other males and females of varying ages do not. I think if you observed more children and other younger people, you would see that their behavior, preferences, and levels of experience in various things are as diverse as that of any adult.

As I noted above, the constant attempts to shelter them from anything outside of the immediate family and the carefully controlled modern classroom setting stifles their natural curiosity and desire for learning, and this is a major disservice to them. I think our job as adults are to help children learn and grow as individuals, not “shield” them so that they adhere to a common socially enforced paradigm.

Thank you for listening, as I understand this is a difficult topic for you to discuss without getting upset.

Just what COULD the sad Sarahs/Humphries/Coultharts and all the usual suspects say? To the likes of Priscilla Presley, Dale Winton, Myra Williams-Lewis, and doubtless ordinary millions more (conveniently monstrous mainstream unreported) NON victim ex-Adultophiles?

Nobody has ever been turned into granite by the stare of a man’s eyes, and nobody (at least in the last couple of centuries in the developed part of the world) has ever contracted leprosy after having being touched by a man – even as a child. “Mortification” can therefore only be due to the fact that the person in question, ever since his or her infant age, has constantly been inculcated with the story that after a stare and a touch, ritual slaughter will be the inevitable third step.

For any of you who do Facebook, I strongly suggest reporting the ‘Stinson Hunter public figure’ page. Everybody who does so should select the same sub-menus for consistency: ‘Report Page’ menu’ (top right, next to ‘share’) > ‘I don’t think it should be on Facebook’ > ‘It’s threatening, violent or suicidal’ > ‘credible threat of violence’.
The evidence of the latter is particularly there, regarding the readers’ comments, rather than anything Hunter himself posts (he’s obviously astute in that way). One browse down all the comments under his post on the 60 minutes interview (big photo of ToC) shows a veritable legion of would-be thugs. Well, not ‘would-be’, a lot of them ARE thugs, doubtless. The comments make my skin crawl (ironically the very phrase they often use for MAPs), completely lacking in rational thought or humaneness. Dangerous, dangerous people, or at least they would be if they had brains, or if God forbid anarchy prevailed. I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted in noting that the supposed concern they feel on behalf of minors is nought but an excuse to express their hate and bullying mentality, which for most of them would find another outlet if not for MAPs. I did a little browsing at some of the commentors’ profiles, and it bears me out. Loathsome specimens of braincell-bereft humanity. The mob dynamic is palpable, even through a cyber page, feeding off each other’s blood-lust directed at the designated ‘witches’ of our age.
Hunter claims not to support vigilantism and violence, but he’s a rabble rouser unequivocally, otherwise he would not let such posts stand on his page. They sustain him, as a maggot needs carrion.
This is worth a try. I’m convinced more people (not only MAPs) would criticise him, but they’re too frightened to in view of the tone of his pages and size of his following. Of course people are scared to be identified with paedophilia if they express even moderation of the hatred. In any case, he pretty quickly removes any critical comments and blocks dissenting users. If he was taken down from Facebook, it would be one heck of a victory, immensely satisfying to think of all those nauseating morons bereaved of a beloved outlet.

Yes, mine was disabled, too a number of months back. No reason was given but I was invited to provide verification of my phone number if I wanted to pursue the matter. I did not. No loss, really, as I never found it terribly useful EXCEPT for such occasions as monitoring the depravities of the Stinson Hunters of the world.

With all of the attention that dreadful 60 Minutes show has gotten, with millions of views overnight, the one spoken-word piece that allows Tom to articulate his views free from rabid dogs lunging at his throat, is that film which, sadly, has gotten a very tiny fraction of the former’s views.

This is one challenge which we, as a community (if such exists) has not yet successfully cracked, i.e. catapulting our own works into the public arena where they can virally propagate. We need people who can do this.

Message on MY Facebook page: “we have reviewed your complaint, and found [the Stinson Hunter page] not to be in violation of the terms of use. Witless morons, or moral cowards, I can’t decide which. What the hell do they make of all his followers comments, if they even reviewed them.. expressions of the will to kill in just about form you can imagine… is it classed as ‘debate’ or ‘banter’? I still live in hope it’s just down to pure numbers; if enough people did complain about SH (as they no doubt have about ToC since the TV debacle), then Facebook being nought but another typical public relations-minded outfit would take him down.

>What the hell do they make of all his followers comments, if they even reviewed them.. expressions of the will to kill in just about form you can imagine

By contrast, nobody would ever have found anything remotely offensive on my Facebook page, which has been suspended. It’s been a long time since I even looked at my page, but so far as I can recall there was little there. My profile might have said I am a retired journalist and that I also used to be a press officer with the Open University. No favourite books or albums, nothing about paedophile activism. Very little of anything, actually.

On Facebook, I have reported antisemitic posts, even openly Hitlerian profiles that both deny the past genocide of Jews and encourage a new genocide, I ticked “hate speech”. But each time Facebook answered that they did not find anything in violation of their terms of use. They prefer to censor pictures of breasfeeding mothers, especially if the baby is nude against the mother. Parental physical tenderness, that is the real obscenity in the eyes of Facebook.

I believe that Facebook’s exclusionary and haughty policies are taking a toll on its popularity. It has suffered mass defections, especially by kids and young people and has acquired a reputation among them as something of an embarrassment. Pedophiles have been explicitly declared persona non grata by it and they will terminate the accounts of anyone they suspect of being a pedophile. They check membership against sex offender registries and, if they find you there, they cut you off from their “community”. They have, for some time now, required phone numbers as a means of verifying identity. Worst of all, they cooperate fully with all government demands to hand over user data. So, I say, let them have it and let us walk away from such a sterile, politically correct enterprise which is contemptuous of children and adolescent rights as well as those of us it deems a threat. It is, after all, a non-governmental entity. We don’t get to tell them how to run their business but we can help in making Facebook increasingly irrelevant by going elsewhere and not helping them in building their user base which is, after all, their source of wealth.

I think banning Stinson Hunter’s pages would be an infringement of free speech and so wrong. I believe in pretty much total free speech rights. Of course, we should protest against him as much as possible–call him a witless and dangerous moron.

>I think banning Stinson Hunter’s pages would be an infringement of free speech and so wrong.

I agree, although I am told (haven’t had time to check) he has carried over 33,000 words of comments this week containing numerous death threats and incitements to violence against me. Those are illegal. I feel I would be justified in seeking police action and may do so.

I would encourage anyone who is the recipient of such threats to take legal action.

As for Stinson’s pages being removed, it would not be censorship in an impermissible form since FaceBook is a private company. The greater question, in my mind, is what effect have his words in a high-visibility arena? Are they clearly not in our interest that they not be expressed or do they make our point and act as an indictment of him and his legions of followers?

Do they have powers of contagion or do they instead act as warnings of the hateful depths to which such crusades can lead?

As with cultural cues such as hair styles and colors, attire, tattoos or piercings, I think we are better off being able to identify our enemies that we may keep a wary eye upon them.

It’s based on a discussion group held with nine (yes, I know, tiny sample size) young Australian men. First they were asked how they would go about turning down sex with a young woman who’d come back to their house. They said they would avoid a direct ‘no’, trying to spare the woman’s feelings with indirect refusals such as “I don’t think I’m ready for this” and “This isn’t quite what I expected tonight.” Asked how they would pick up on a woman’s unwillingness to have sex, they said from her body language and from hints such as “I just remembered I’m working early in the morning.”

When the subject of rape was raised, everything changed. The men said that if a man doesn’t get a clear ‘no’, he may honestly misunderstand, because men need to be told things directly. One suggested that women have plenty of opportunities to stop a misunderstanding before it starts by not flirting, not going home with a man, etc. But before the R-word was mentioned, these men had given no indication that they did not understand and accept indirect refusals. Statistically, perhaps one of them, no more, had raped somebody or would go on to do so.

Probably there’s lots of stuff to do with masculinity going on here, stuff I don’t fully understand. Perhaps some of these men had been upset when a public figure they admired, or someone they knew personally and liked, was accused of rape, and were trying to make excuses for this person. And probably they were scared of being falsely accused.

According to the US Justice Department, 14.8% of women are raped during their lifetime. Child sex abuse and ‘child sex abuse’ statistics are kept separately, I understand, so we don’t have a lot of consensual underage sex inflating the numbers. Also according to the US Justice Department, for every 100 rapes, 46 reports of rape are made to the police. It’s difficult to estimate the number of false rape reports, but from what I’ve read 8% seems like a good estimate — and yes, this is much higher than the false report rate for other crimes. Let’s assume that all of the people reporting rape to the police are women who have been raped by men or claim to have been. We know this isn’t true, but it isn’t far off the truth. Let’s also assume that every report of rape concerns a different accused man. We know this very definitely isn’t true, and it will give us an overestimate of the likelihood of being falsely accused, but perhaps this is needed, because there are other ways of being falsely accused than by a report made with the police: you may lose friends, for example, if someone lies to your friend group that you raped her, without going to the police. 8% of 46% of 14.8% is 0.54464%. Thus, very very roughly the likelihood of a man’s being falsely accused of rape over his lifetime is about 1 in 180. That’s probably a substantial overestimate, actually. By contrast, the likelihood of a man’s suffering an attempted or completed rape over his lifetime is about 1 in 33 (US Justice Department again). For women it is 1 in 6 or 7. Furthermore, according to the FBI, if you are reported for rape you stand a 26% chance of being arrested, a 20% chance of being prosecuted and an 11% chance of being convicted. I would guess — well, I would certainly hope — that a lot of false reports are caught at some stage. The arrest is probably where your life collapses around your ears. The average man has about a 1 in 720 chance, maximum, of this happening to him.

I don’t want to minimise this. 1 in 180 is not actually a tiny number. I’d be worried about 1 in 180, even about 1 in 720. There are men who go to prison for rapes they did not commit. Even a false report that’s never followed up can wreak serious havoc in someone’s life. And fear doesn’t follow the statistics: there are many people who are far more scared of flying than they are of crossing the road, and at the end of the day you have to accept and respect that they feel how they feel.

Finally saw 60 Minutes yesterday, as broadcast. It was every paedophile activist’s worst nightmare! Well, mine anyway. The outrageousness of this cross between Fox News ferocity and the conspiracy theory lunacy of David Icke (he who believes the elite are genetically descended from a race of 12-foot, blood-drinking, shape-shifting lizards) and his ilk left me gasping.

This crap fest was utterly devoid of any credible testimony to the killing of children or any of the other lurid alleged abuse that was claimed – which is why the UK press appears to have ignored the claims completely this morning, an outcome soon judged by the conspiracy-minded twitter twits as proving that the entire British media is also part of the cover-up. Oh, yes, and let’s not forget prime minister David Cameron too. After he made dismissive remarks about the “Westminster scandal”, he was soon being denounced as a closet paedophile himself!

As for my own contribution, it was butchered – deliberately shorn of shorn of all the research information and argument I had used to support my points about consent. I had gone along to defend my friends Peter Righton and Charles Napier against baseless allegations of brutality and murder. Not a word of that was used.

Also, those who heard my private audio tape of the whole interview will have heard me remark right at the beginning that I was hot and that I was anxious over sweating on camera as Richard Nixon famously did in a tough TV encounter with John Kennedy his rival for the US presidency. My interview took place on the hottest day this year, at 35C in London. It only took a brisk walk from the Tube station to reach the interview venue on time to do the damage. After I had mopped my brow, the interviewer assured me they would stop the filming if there was any visible perspiration. He didn’t. He was lying. In retrospect, I am sure he was delighted that a glistening face seemed to betray the pressure I was under.

And pressure there undeniably was. To remain coherent in the teeth of a sustained barrage of personal insinuations and emotive hostility, obsessively repeated not matter what you say, is no easy task, believe me. But the viewers were not shown the repeated taunting, the deliberate provocation. All they saw was my tense body language in response.

More fool me for turning up, I suppose, especially judging by the vitriolic online response on Twitter and elsewhere. I was pleased and surprised, though, to see that one moderated site, The Steeple Times (claiming 900,000 viewers per month) allowed me to post a rebuke to my attackers:

Said site ‘with 900,000 viewers per month’ makes for quite an amusing browse, if the lack of intelligence and open-mindedness were not so demoralizing to behold. One contributor’s mantra in reply to any well-reasoned argument is… ‘You have a very sick and twisted take on this subject. I am appalled by your views actually.’ Credit to the editor in allowing free speech, though (for now), even though next to every heretical post he pastes upper case disclaimers which makes him sound like a defeated schoolboy.

Against my better judgement, I keep returning to that guy’s ‘newspaper’ – The Steeple Times – to see how goes the ‘debates’. Also I’ve done a bit of googling to find out who he is and what the hell is his authority for making any kind of commentary on the world. Economics graduate, it seems, and set himself up as a blogger. Everything I’ve found exudes sterile, witless dork, with delusions of relevance and literary talent. It’s remarkably hard to get a handle on just what he’s actually ‘interested’ in. Witness this page, all glossy smugness and no substance:https://about.me/matthewsteeples
I probably should not descend to this level of mud-slinging (please do block the post if inappropriate), particularly as he was at least willing to publish heretical comments, but it was an infuriating experience, like combating a churlish schoolkid who knew he was intellectually trounced, and I felt the need to vent to sympathetic ears.

Part of me also wishes I had time to engage with some of the twitter fanatics. Not easy, of course. But Mary Beard did exactly that, directly dialoging, successfully, with some very nastily misogynistic characters.

Irrespective of age, consent must be informed. Implied or affirmative consent in themselves are not satisfactory. There are a number of reasons for that, not just ethical or developmental, but also legal; Informed consent keeps everyone right, and empowers all parties when they move to the next step of choosing to say yes because it feels good. It may seem a bit clinical, but in this day and age and in our present state of evolution it’s the way forward.

The starting point for informed consent should be proper sex education in schools, beginning at primary school age. This is the best instrument for protecting children from the kind of abusers that your interviewer was referring.

Age of Consent law is a blunt instrument in child protection. Consent should be more dynamic, personal, and informed. Perhaps replacing the age of consent with a new set of child and youth-centred legal proposals would be a better way to go. Because the age of consent is not going to deter a determined abuser is it? And if a child is ignorant of how to handle an unwanted encounter, or where to get help, then the police and the law are not really serving the purpose of ‘keeping people safe’. Law is not working, only lining the pockets of lawyers and crusaders. Education and access to healthcare is the way forward.

If consent must consist of intellectual comprehension and conscious wilful agreement, obviously some individuals through age or other factors simply won’t have the capacity for consent. I accept therefore that informed consent does raise complex questions about the human right to sexual fulfilment of other categories of people, such as the disabled, the elderly, the mentally impaired, not just minors.

In addition, If consent must be informed, where do we draw lines? An arbitrary age? Or contextual activity according to age, and the ages of those involved?

I sincerely think the 1885 kneejerk Age of Consent law is not working as a protective tool, there are too many nasty or messy stories on the news that prove that (Oxford Rotherham). Instead it is criminalising sexually active young people. Abuse should be stamped out, not young peoples sexual autonomy and fulfilment. I think consent is really important, but we have to look at it differently, and who owns it. Where does the autonomy and prerogative lie. At the moment consent is objective by legal statute, instead it ought to be objective by personal intellectual comprehension and volition.

So I don’t agree that implied consent is satisfactory, but I do believe that things need to change, because the present system harm many and helps few.

Hello Alice, always nice to ‘see’ another female ‘face’. I agree with most of what you say here.

I don’t know about informed consent though. It kind of depends what you mean by that. If we’re talking about a risky activity such as rugby or penis-in-anus/penis-in-vagina, I do strongly agree that people need to be informed about the risks, and I would also argue that there is a certain age — flexible and variable in practice — below which we shouldn’t let people do these things however keen they are: an extreme example would be the three-year-old who asks for an adult’s penis in her anus. But things like mutual masturbation aren’t going to land anyone with a pregnancy, an STI or a ruptured Achilles tendon, so informed consent here is less important: if you try it and don’t like it, well, you’re not stuck with any lasting consequences.

i do think informed consent is important in some other circumstances where it’s blithely overlooked. There’s a popular 1994 movie called The Little Rascals, based loosely on the 1930s Our Gang shorts. It’s on YouTube, with the sound pitched up to avoid copyright claims. Almost all the cast was aged 4-8 at the time of filming. Four-year-old model (!) Brittany Ashton Holmes, described by one reviewer as “lushly gorgeous” and by another as “a vamp in baby Gap”, plays the love interest of our hero, played by eight-year-old Bug Hall. If a girl of four and a boy of eight were caught in sexual play, the older child could well end up branded an abuser, let’s not forget. Little Brittany, whose character is the only significant girl in the movie, is made to come out with lines that make her sound like a fickle, venial woman twenty or thirty years older, and the movie is liberally sprinkled with sexual innuendo. Call me a prude, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. The kid didn’t know what she was saying. You could say that she was being exploited for the amusement of adults. By contrast, there’s an Our Gang short, also on YouTube, in which two little boys have a crush on their young female teacher. One attempts to woo her with mangled sentences poorly memorised from his father’s love letters, and is seen kissing a cardboard figure, pretending it’s her. The other sits on the sofa with her, tells her she’s even prettier than last year’s teacher, who was also evidently last year’s love interest, and is rewarded with a kiss right smack on the mouth. Cue shocked comments from YouTubers. But young children know what a crush is, they know what a kiss is. Those kids were informed. (They may have been shoved unwillingly into acting by their parents, but that’s another issue.)

The 60 Minutes programme was broadcast two or three hours ago. I haven’t seen it yet but there has been a predictably outraged Twitter reaction. The programme’s website has the following, which says the guy who interviewed me “reveals how children were killed”. Really? Not even allegedly? Jeez, looks like this show is even more the tabloid pits than than Exaro, which takes a bit of doing.

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: Spies, Lords & Predators
JULY 19, 2015

It’s shaping up to be the biggest political scandal in Britain’s history. There is new evidence that some of the country’s most respected men were in fact depraved paedophiles. Leaders that were preying on children as young as eight and nine. Many of the kids were trafficked from state-run homes and other institutions to be abused by MPs, Lords, and spies. They were protected from on high by a secret code, and have never been held to account for their horrific crimes. 60 Minutes investigates the scandal and the cover up, speaks to the victims and the witnesses, and confronts a member of the notorious paedophile information exchange. Reporter Ross Coulthart also reveals how children were killed in order to protect this network of predators – and how the driver to the Australian High Commissioner could hold the key to blowing this case wide open.

A few of those outraged Twitter reactions appear to go beyond merely wishing for your death, Tom; they actually express a willingness to bring it about. No, I don’t think you should worry about it (much) although you might want to be a bit more cautious than is usual.

Keeping in mind that there have been a number of Twitterers, at this point, who have found themselves in court over significantly less, one wonders if it would not be advisable to lodge formal complaints. I think this is worthy of some consideration.

I will watch the show now having girded my loins for what promises to be an extremely distasteful spectacle. Okay, I admit, I don’t really know how to gird my loins but it seems this occasion may warrant it.

‘I will watch the show now having girded my loins for what promises to be an extremely distasteful spectacle’. You extremely understate it, sir. Judging by the video snippets below, it has the look of a classless made-for-TV movie. Even if it is not that, it’s the way they evidently want to market it to the masses, which in itself does not speak well.

It looks like the monsters encouraged by the authorities are going out of control, like the islamists who were armed and hailed during the anti-soviet djihad in Afghanistan, and who turned against their former Western friends.
There is often a moment when reactionaries “go to far”, like when Hitler invaded the USSR or McCarthy attacked the US Army, and this has generally been the beginning of their collapse.

Just watched. Yuk. The biggest problem with the film is that you are being taken out of context, you look like you are defending the systematic abuse of kids in care, when you were in fact talking about something completely different. Is my interpretation.

Apropos of knickers. An acquaintance of mine once made a loud entrance to a family gathering in her nightie, many years ago, at age 10, announcing “I’m not wearing knickers” to all (and particularly to me :)) thus showing that the negotiation protocol as detailed in your book is sometimes not necessary.

It’s shaping up to be the biggest political scandal in Britain’s history. There is new evidence that some of the country’s most respected men were in fact depraved paedophiles. Leaders that were preying on children as young as eight and nine. Many of the kids were trafficked from state-run homes and other institutions to be abused by MPs, Lords, and spies. They were protected from on high by a secret code, and have never been held to account for their horrific crimes. 60 Minutes investigates the scandal and the cover up, speaks to the victims and the witnesses, and confronts a member of the notorious paedophile information exchange. Reporter Ross Coulthart also reveals how children were killed in order to protect this network of predators – and how the driver to the Australian High Commissioner could hold the key to blowing this case wide open.

Is this description of the show serious? This may be the most lurid bit of sensationalistic nonsense I have ever read, which is saying something considering the amount of nonsense I routinely read about this topic! This guy isn’t even trying to be a serious journalist! It would appear that with this topic, too many people in the media believe they need not worry about anything resembling serious journalistic integrity, i.e., the pursuit of facts and truth. Based on how I heard they took your words out of context, Tom, and considering the nonsense I read above, I’m sorry, but that guy just used you. His agenda seems to have nothing to do with getting to the truth of the matter. He’s out to “expose a scandal” by any means necessary, including creating as many details as he may need to achieve that.

Those mindless bands of Twitterers (interesting how David called them that; though that sounds better than “tweeters”) who call for your death without the least bit of concern for exploring the truth only embolden people like Coulthart, who make a mockery out of journalistic integrity. Those people are being used also, for their mindless willingness to just put their rational faculties aside whenever this subject is broached. They are acting as enablers for Coulthart and the rest of his cohorts in sensation-mongering pseudo-journalism.

To further enlighten the SIMS/Shallow Ignorant Masses aka ‘Sheeple’. And finally trash the overpaid kid-SeXploiting mainstream pimps and whores obsessed with just 4% childsex so called ‘victims’, who are likely 96% NON-victims. While criminally neglecting the proven vast 96% NON-sex Serious child abuse victims and survivors, about whom those mainstream pimps and whore just don’t give a damn!

Yes of course, and you are expressing the flow of the spirit of any unsubjugated person living within our rather dismally unspiritual times.
This morning, I looked at the sky and thought that this world could be, possibly, one of the mot beautiful worlds in this (whole) universe!

To those overpaid immoral mainstream pimps and whores, for 4-decades kid seXploiting an insignificant 4% of all supposed ‘child abuse’. While criminally neglecting a proven vast 96% of NON-sex serious child abuses, with millions of child victims and survivors. About whom those immoral mainstream pimps and whores just don’t give a damn!

Cum on spiritless Ethanickers and overpaid immoral mainstream pimps and whores. Get ’em down and show the world what you’ve got for TRUE Child Protection – that’s worth a wank!

At the moment your posts are “uncategorized”. A step towards an index would be to sort your posts into distinct categories; with WP, categories can be hierarchized, you can make a category a “child” of another “parent” category. For instance you could have a “sexology” category, with subcategories “childhood sexuality”, “heterosexuality”, “paedophilia”, etc., then one about “journalism”, etc. You can have several hierarchies, corresponding to orthogonal subdivisions. Categories allow specific searches, especially if you put tags and categories in your WP “widgets” column. I have done that on my WP blog (in my WP style, widgets are at the bottom).
Concerning Spain, yes Wikipedia says that the law was passed this month, beside raising the age of content, it deals with repression in various domains. As said the Guardian article, the conservative government cancelled sex education for the 11 yo; instead of letting youth have sex while being educated about it, they prefer to forbid it to them and to leave them ignorant.
In France we are at the moment spared by the “affirmative consent” debate. According to the law, lack of consent means “constraint, violence, threat or surprise” (the latter includes the case where the person is seriously drunk).

the conservative government cancelled sex education for the 11 yo; instead of letting youth have sex while being educated about it, they prefer to forbid it to them and to leave them ignorant.

(Writing as the poster who originally raised this issue on BC last week…)

Yes, that’s a major concern of mine too, even as one who thinks 13 was too young (but doesn’t believe that AOC guidance should criminalise anyone).

However, the centre-right in Spain have a history of getting heavy-handed and being shot down in flames later. They tried re-criminalising cannabis, for example. It was like putting toothpaste back into the tube in a societal sense. Spain is a country for whom Franco’s dictatorship is still a living memory; they take their civil rights very seriously.

You really have to live there to understand, I guess. We’ll see how all this (including the draconian punishments proposed for breach of the new regulations) pans out in the long run.

I tried looking for the 60 Minutes episode in questions on You Tube. I don’t know quite how their search algorithm works, but I know it’s based on what other people making the same query have searched for.

So, as a bit of light relief, this is what came out of my fruitless search.

Dammit, it freaked me out. That kid soooo reminds me of myself at that age. Cocky little runt that he is 😉

Suppose, g. reader, that the age of consent is abolished tomorrow. Naturally you’re delighted. You’re also delighted when, a short time later, you strike up a friendship with an attractive pre-teen boy (that’s a guess at the preference of a plurality here; sub in your own preference as necessary). You introduce some physicality into the relationship — hugs, wrestling in swimming trunks — and he clearly enjoys it. Everything’s going great. One night the two of you sleep in adjacent rooms, so you do the most natural thing in the world: early the next morning, while he’s still asleep, you go into his room, climb onto his bed, insert a finger into his rectum and rub your penis on his thigh. He wakes up, puts his arms over his face and stays still, so you say nothing, and keep going for some time. Except you wouldn’t do any of that, would you? And it’s pretty obvious why, right?

Or imagine that one evening he gets into your liquor supply. You want to keep on being the fun permissive grown-up friend, so you figure what the hell, you’re here to look after him and once won’t hurt him, and you let him go ahead. He gets tipsy and giggly and keeps cracking jokes with you, and then he drinks some more and starts slurring badly and collapses drowsily on the sofa with his head on your lap. What do you do? Probably you sit there for a while stroking his hair and rubbing his back and thinking how lucky you are, and then you carry him to bed and get him to drink some water if he can manage it and put a bucket on the floor by his head. Something along those lines. What you probably don’t do is get his trousers down while he mumbles incoherently, reasoning that he must want it, all boys do really, and anyway he shouldn’t really have been drinking, and anyway he’s too drunk to have a clear idea what’s happening let alone resist, and you can say later that he’d been physical with you before and here he was leaning all over you and he never said no and you didn’t realise quite how drunk he was, so how were you to know he didn’t like it?

The adult versions of those scenarios are what affirmative consent proponents want to stop. (Mostly. Nearly everything has a lunatic fringe.) They are not misunderstandings or cases of mere bad manners. They are things you don’t do if you are equipped with a very basic level of common sense, social nous and decency.

Of course there can be mitigating circumstances, as there can be with anything. One such set of circumstances might be being socially awkward with little idea how to establish a sexual relationship and consequently winding up lonely and desperately sexually frustrated. Another might be being very young, or being rather drunk yourself. And so on.

Thing Two that I’ve been thinking about today is a piece by Thomas Macaulay Millar discussing much-written-about cases such as the Steubenville and Corona del Mar rapes and how they’re an exercise in ritual humiliation and group bonding, not in sexual-satisfaction-getting. Obviously rapes like that represent a small subgroup of all rapes, but not, I think, a tiny one: I’ve heard several accounts that sounded similar, with the difference that those rapes, like most, were never reported. The rapes in this subgroup generally look like this: a group of boys in their mid-to-late teens are friends, and they’re high on the social totem pole, with no trouble getting sex and girlfriends. There’s a social gathering with much alcohol flowing. The boys get somewhat drunk. A teenage girl at the gathering, often a bit younger than the boys, isn’t used to drinking and inadvertently gets so drunk she passes out or nearly does. The boys decide to have a bit of fun, and rape her. Typically what they’re doing, though, is not putting penises into her orifices, but putting fingers, bottles, broom handles etc. into them. They’re not getting off, they’re getting a laugh. They take photos and videos of the proceedings and share them around. It’s a great big joke.

When my schoolfriends and I were all seventeen and eighteen and had just finished some important exams and left school, someone’s parents went away for the weekend and, of course, we seized the opportunity to have a house party. One boy, who was considered an odd fish and didn’t really have close friends at school, tried to show off by matching drink for drink a boy who was already an experienced drinker. Predictably, Boy One ended up passed out. A group of other boys drew penises on him and photographed the results; no doubt these days the photos would be put on social media. While this was going on the rest of us stood round laughing. Then we all left the unconscious boy wedged in the bathtub on his back and wandered off, till somebody suddenly realised that in that position he might aspirate his vomit, whereupon several of us rushed back, full of self-importance and shouting orders to each other, and got him turned onto his side. After that a couple of the girls took turns to sit with him till he woke up, which suprisingly only took a few hours. When he did wake he stormed off, humiliated and furious (and still drunk). We went on thinking it was funny. The boys who’d done the drawing felt great. It doesn’t seem so funny now: the drawn-on boy was so hurt he refused to talk about it at all.

I can imagine a version of this prank that’s much more benign, a joke between friends taken in good part. I can also imagine a version with a much crueler and nastier edge. The rape-with-objects I described above is like an extra cruel and nasty version. And when I read or hear about it I don’t think, That could have been me. We were all jerks to that boy, except the girls who sat with him overnight, and I wasn’t one of them. But nobody put a pool cue or a lit cigarette in his anus, and had somebody tried, I believe the rest of us would have put a stop to it, adolescent and drunk and uproarious and in a herd though we were.

I like the way you’ve been making your own recordings of these conversations and publishing them. Maybe you (or a volunteer) could stitch together points you made of a similar theme from different interviews (excluding the words of interviewers for copyright reasons) and publish each topical collection as an audio-essay? Audio-books are all the rage now and, if you give enough interviews, your blog could have an auditory companion piece. (Unless, of course, Paedophilia: The Radical Case has an audio-book version. If so, it should probably take the place of audio-companion.)

I concur with Jasmine on this, Tom. When you make such audio tapes widely available, then you create an official record of what was actually said that every objective interested party can have access to. It will also make it very clear to all concerned how you’re so severely taken out of context via “clever” editing by those who interview you. Those nutcase Twitterers can readily be put in their place by the availability of such audio recordings.

I agree that keeping recordings is a significant way of informing people who are prepared to engage with what really happened. This is an as yet small but important audience. The message won’t reach the “nutcase Twitterers” though because they’d rather fill their ears with molten lead than actually listen.

A word of congratulations on the 11-part YouTube film. I found no.5 particularly interesting. The repression of the Americans, and resultant violence, is a very good point. The civil law ideals for sexual interaction between adult and minor is truly inspired, philosophically and ethically heavyweight. It would indeed be a legal mountain to achieve, and a society like Britain is certainly not ready for it (even less so now than the 70s). I could just about see a Scandanavian country going that way in the future, although the joys of multiculturalism would now probably hold that back. I truly believe those PIE recommendations are a vision of the future, although how distant I’d hate to say. You’re ahead of your time, Tom, that’s the problem.

OK, I think I get what you mean. Come up with a topic list and we’ll see, I guess.

I got so drawn into the 60 Minutes interview that I couldn’t wait till this evening to listen in full. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m stuck between the devil and the deep blue attraction on this one. I s’pose I’m a Virtuous Heretic. But the very fact that your conversation took place was ground-breaking and I think you held your ground admirably.

It will be interesting to see the final cut. I’m not holding my breath for any progress in that…

The most fascist thing about it is this…’under the new education law proposed by Spain’s rightwing government, sex education will be removed from the curriculum’. WTF? Is this a regression to Victorian times of squeamishness, or a conscious attempt to keep the minds of girls and boys in sterile ignorance of a fundamental aspect of their humanity, for the purpose of loving Big Brother instead? (not the TV show, well maybe that too – the opiate of the masses).

When it comes to affirmative consent (in general), I think the following needs to be kept in mind: If you should ask your partner if they are okay with something you are doing, any non-committal or ambivalent response must always be taken as a resounding “NO”. Such responses include the following: “I guess…”; “I think so…”; “I don’t know…”; “sure” (“sure” pretty much never means “yes”). As Tom noted, you also need to consider tone of voice and facial expressions. If you hear “yes” or “yeah…” in a sulky or non-enthusiastic manner with a pouty expression, you need to take that as an ambivalent response, as this strongly suggests they are not fully comfortable with what you are doing, and are trying to convey it to you in a subtle rather than “combative” manner.

Many individuals will resist passively, and this is important to keep in mind. If you’re becoming intimate with someone, and they are just sitting there and not responding with that sullen expression, then you can rest assured they are not into it. In fact, that is a common means of resistance for someone who is either afraid to say “no” outright, or concerned about hurting your feelings, or if they simply do not want to make their true lack of feelings too obvious (e.g., if they want you to believe they have feelings that they actually do not for whatever reason).

We can get deeper and deeper into this. Failure to pick up on or respond to the subtle lack of enthusiasm in a “yeah” is not a reason, in my view, to imprison somebody (not that you were claiming this). It’s more like what Tom called below a lack of sexual good manners, or it could be a genuine mistake: people vary in their social sensitivity, for one thing. But there are much clearer-cut cases. The latest I read of (it was never reported, like most as it seems) the girl in question, aged seventeen or eighteen, was woken up with sex by the guy, whom she was not in a standing sexual relationship with, and she just put her arms over her face and stayed still. A little child playing tickling games knows that if someone puts their arms over their face and doesn’t move, they’re not having fun any more. Another analogy: if you’ve lent me a laptop before, and you’re showing me your nice new laptop, and I pick it up and put it under my arm and walk off down the road with it, and you’re so taken aback and confused and disbelieving that all you can do is stand there with your mouth open looking rather silly, and by the time you pull yourself together enough to shout “Hey, stop, what are you doing?” I’m out of earshot, and I later say “But he didn’t say I couldn’t”, I’ve still stolen your laptop; why should different rules apply in the sexual equivalent of this situation?

The other thing about affirmative consent is that according to the best data we have it is quite a targeted strategy. Lisak and Miller’s studies indicate that the typical M.O. of a serial rapist — and I gather that about ninety percent of all rapes are committed by people who have done it before or will do it again — involves not violence, but alcohol: while remaining clear-headed themselves, they pick out people to do sex to who are incapacitated to the point where they can’t say a no, so that they (the rapists) remain (perhaps) legally and (definitely, and more importantly in practice) socially in the clear. Affirmative consent makes this M.O. unavailable.

This was frustrating. I would like you to have asked things like: “Why is the psychiatric term “paedophile” used to mean a child abuser?” or “why is there no guidance on what an indecent image of a child is”? (I have looked at the law, and it wreaks of thought-crime), and ultimately, I would love you to have thrown that word “consent” back in his face, and ask “Where is the consent from “little boys” to amputate their G-spots in the name of religion?” Still legal in his country. I am sure most “little boys” would rather be touched on the genitals rather than be sexually mutilated. I am not saying either is acceptable, but I would like to know why these people are so interested in condemning adult-child sexual interaction that is already illegal and tremendously demonised, when the genital mutilation of boys is still totally legal and approved of. He talks about law and how it MUST be “morally correct”. What a load of crap!

[TOC adds: Unfortunately, special sensitivities attach to running H-TOC, such that I don’t think it would be wise to give the YouTube link you gave at the end. I saw a viewer’s comment below it which read:

Your male infant circumcision carnage carousel images juxtaposed with images of NSPCC Jon Brown said it all. Brown, the NSPCC’s head of sexual abuse programmes, has never yet uttered a single word in defence of any male child’s right to genital integrity–a human right. He sits silently, while the baby male children, with cut and bleeding genitals, scream their little lungs out in agony. He has failed male children. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has failed male children. Their motto is “Every childhood is worth fighting for.” But it doesn’t mean “Every MALE childhood is worth fighting for”, does it? Apparently not. They will, most certainly, not fight for boys.]

I can see you’re not an advocate for ritual circumcision (phew), so I am surprised you disallowed my video to be shown on your page. One way we battle hysteria is to show the hypocrisy of society, and we do that by sharing information as widely as possible, I get it, you would not want a video showing the genital mutilation of children given the current stereotype of a paedophile, but there is nothing illegal in that video. All that footage is 100% legal to view, and taken mainly from youtube – without age-restriction I might add. The IWF state all those videos are outside their remit, so there is no prohibition on viewing such things. Allow the video please, and let people see the blatant double standards we have surrounding child abuse. It’s those in children’s welfare authorities that condone such acts! Take it to them! Make them explain! 😦

This may seem very strange if you have never been at the sharp end of the law, but no one, not even the most expert lawyer in the field, could say whether the video in question (based on the verbal description given) is or is not legal. That is because, if it were to come to court (and it could), then it would be for the jury to decide, not for any lawyers.

Yes, YouTube can show it and they are not prosecuted. However, in my position as a “convicted paedophile”, they will prosecute at the slightest excuse. Please don’t tell me it would not happen. It already has. I was convicted on the basis of images so mild that even the Court of Appeal had to admit they could have been taken by any ordinary parent without being abusive, and which could have been framed and displayed in the family home without embarrassment, where they would have been seen by the guy who’s come to fix the plumbing or deliver the new sofa.

I understand, it took me a little while for the penny to drop, but my blood boils over the lack of awareness or even care amongst paedophiles who are trying to combat the stigma. I am a paedophile, and the NHS did that to me; how am I supposed to feel about it? A woman groped a few decades ago, would be heavily compensated and her “abuser”s life destroyed, while I spend my life as a social outcast and also a victim of ritual (not medical) circumcision actually inflicted by the NHS. I am not trying to score victimhood points, but I became enraged yesterday reading your posts on here about Stinson getting BAFTA’s etc, and then hearing your interview with no mention of this double standard.
Boys are not born defective, and circumcisions are actually very unnecessary, even when there are medical issues. Men and boys basic human rights don’t even seem to exist in today’s society. I thank you however, for the work you have done. Please point out this double standard the next time you’re lucky enough to bag an interview. Level 10 on the Copine scale – all over youtube and the internet, and nobody cares – even the IWF say it’s “outside their remit”. It proves to me that society is sexually warped, and this hysteria is NOT about protecting children from abuse. I discovered a video by Stinson yesterday crying over this mental health issues, and I kid you not, this was in his description:

“It’s important that people are more open about mental health issues without feeling like they will be cast out and treated differently.”

‘Why is the term paedophile used to mean child abuser’? Yes, a huge amount of ignorance still reigns on that. Similarly, differentiating paedophile from ephebephile, ‘sexual interaction’ from kidnap (evinced by Coulthart apparently thinking that a little girl in a man’s lap is the ‘worst nightmare’). If an official and public recognition of these differences can be achieved, that would be substantial and worthwhile progress in itself.

Thanks for that, very interesting. It confirms that Alison Saunders didn’t simply lose control of her tongue, but meant every syllable of it. Listen to her end statement. I could not believe what I was hearing.

Better yet ask him “what are the guidelines for an indecent image of a child?” Because I bet you this condescending prick doesn’t know. A great tactic to undermine someone’s authority is to ask them questions that expose their ignorance. It won’t work if the person is genuinely knowledgeable but most of the time these narcissistic self-righteous assholes are really dumb especially on subjects they claim superiority in. The trick is to quiz them the way a teacher would a student.

But of course it won’t do any good when it’s done on their own turf since they will simply edit out anything that makes them look stupid. Better to just not talk to these people at all. Best way to show contempt for someone is to ignore them like they don’t matter. As a child I was really good at ignoring people I didn’t like, so much that the counselors told my parents they thought I had selective mutism.

While the majority of proponents of affirmative consent pretend to be sex positive, they are really sex negative. The fact that they only seem to care about consent when it comes to sex is evidence of this. It’s like people who fight against prostitution because they say it’s coercive meanwhile ignoring the fact that the entire economic system itself is inherently coercive. Sure some women will go into prostitution because they need the money to survive but people will also work shitting jobs at Walmart for the same reason. So if one really cared about the broader issue they’d be concerned with a lot more than just sex. The reason they don’t see a walmart employee and a sex worker as suffering from the same inherent problem is because they have strong negative attitudes towards sex. They don’t care if someone is coerced into doing other things.

Some people go even further than affirmative consent and want an ‘enthusiastic consent’ standard. That I’m strongly against. It would rule out the good old ‘pity fuck’, for one thing, and also a lot else. One interview subject in Chin-Keung Li’s The Main Thing is Being Wanted was a thirty-six-year-old businessman who had sex with young teenage boys. He explained, “Now, it’s not the case with the one at the moment because he enjoys the sex as much as I do if not more, but I know that in the past, there may have been occasions, I mean once the relationship is established, where the boy would — I have to differentiate this from force or whatever — but I mean there may have been occasions where the boy would make love because I wanted to, all right? Hmm, he may have been actually ready to go to sleep. That’s the other side of the coin to me watching the go-kart for three hours, OK? …The thing that’s mutual is the love and affection, all right? Out of that affection, we do things for each other.” Lex, thirteen, was interviewed for Boys on their Contacts with Men and said of Richard, thirty-one, “Well, you ought to have sex, because he does so much for me. He takes me out a lot. So I should pay him back somehow; that’s what he thinks, but I think so, too, so I’m not against it.” Questioned further, he said, “Well, if you don’t feel like it you don’t do it, of course. Richard never really forces you or says ‘Now you got to, because I did what you wanted.’ He’d never say that.”

I see nothing wrong with those situations, which under an enthusiastic consent standard would be illegal. It’s nobody’s business why people have consensual sex.

I’m pretty ignorant about the law, but a lawyer, Thomas Macaulay Millar, has written extensively on the Yes Means Yes blog about the legal ramifications of an affirmative consent standard, which he supports. Somebody in the comments section there wrote something along these lines: if you have a nice new bike and I steal it, I am legally innocent until proven guilty and the burden of proof is on you, not on me, but if I choose to defend myself by saying “He told me I could borrow it” you are not then obliged to show that you didn’t. Affirmative consent laws would work something like that, supposedly. Or we could think of it like this: “X did Y sexual thing to me while I wasn’t consenting.” — “What proof do you have that that you weren’t consenting?” — “Well, I didn’t say yes, I didn’t move…” rather than “What proof do you have that you weren’t consenting? How many times did you say no? Why were you in X’s room anyway? Just how hard did you struggle?” and on and on, which is what often happens without an affirmative consent standard. The bar for being able to claim that you reasonably thought someone was consenting when they weren’t would simply be set a lot higher than it is now. But, again, I am fairly vague on all of this and would welcome some enlightenment.

Somebody else pointed out that if two people consensually have sex according to the ‘gatekeeper standard’, where silence is taken to signify consent, nobody’s to know about it unless the silent one decides to bring an accusation. Of course, there is the problem of false accusations.

Some have objected that if we had an affirmative consent standard many men (mostly) would be scared off of being persistent when women (mostly) were saying no but really, for whatever reason, just wanted some persistence before they said yes. Well, probably, but what’s wrong with that? It’d likely make young women think twice before they played games like that, which are liable to lead to a lot of hurt and frustration and confusion. (Of course if you negotiate the playing of such games, that’s different and fine.)

It may be right to have a higher standard for consent looking forward than looking backward.

In other words, if you are with someone, child or adult, and weighing up whether you do or do not have consent, you should adopt a very high standard of affirmative consent.

But if it is a court, looking back after a complaint has been made, to decide whether there had been consent, it would be unfair, and have terrible consequences, to decide on a subtle basis of sexual good manners that consent had not been given. You could wreck someone’s reputation, screw up their career, and send them to jail for decades for possibly little more than being impolite in bed. The criminal test should demand proof beyond all reasonable doubt that consent had been absent.

Of course. But I think the proof should be something like the absence of a yes or any nonverbal positive response, rather than the absence of a no plus the absence of a struggle (of course in both cases this comes down to one person’s word against another’s). Am I being legally reasonable here or away with the fairies?

How does one retrospectively prove someone said yes or no…affirmative consent is a real romance killer, And I can’t see it working in the long run.
Though, It could still blow from across the pond. There’s a good article on Spiked on that subject.

About the little girl scenario — As Tom mentioned, This scenario would not usually include a girl of 10,11 or 12….Because a girl of that age is unlikely to be sat an a guys lap, Unless its a close family; And we can leave incest for another day, Despite the fact that most ‘abuse’ happens with relatives of the child.

But if most guys, who are not that familiar with a particular girl, where to, say, Pick her up, put her on your lap to watch the Tv or something; Most would make themselves pretty clear that they are comfortable on your lap — Weather through body language — Verbal, Or probably both. He was focusing on a very narrow element of adult/child relations with autistic precision!

I don’t think it need be a real romance killer. Most people are used to navigating consent nonverbally and to speaking up if necessary. It can be quite natural and fluid. And even if it does kill the mood once in a while, better that than a horrible misunderstanding.

You point out that older girls generally don’t sit on men’s laps. TOC points out in his post that explicit verbal consent is likely to work better with older kids. I now realise that all the examples I have used are of…older kids. So here’s an example from Lautmann of affirmative nonverbal consent practised by a man with five-year-old girls:

“What usually happens with me is that I tickle her one time, and while playing around I stroke her bottom, also once between the legs. Then at that point I’ll wait, holding off: Will she seize the initiative or won’t she. If not, there’s no point; she has no desire for it. Then she’ll move my hand away. You can still tickle her then, but you probably shouldn’t touch her in any other way.”

Indeed, we think younger kids are hottest but then we neatly duck the consent issue by talking about teenagers! So thanks for finding this very good example of gentlemanly conduct towards a 5 year old 🙂

There’s not much research out there on sex between children under ten and adults and very little indeed on sex between children under seven and adults. One of the many virtues of Lautmann’s Attraction to Children is that it has plenty of information about the really little ones. “Now and then, when she’s on my lap, she takes my arm and grabs it between her legs; she puts herself right on my arm and rocks. When I move my hand, she holds onto it. In certain ways then she is receptive. However, one has to be very careful; three-and-a-half is an age when they must not be shocked.”

I should have pointed out that the reason some people uphold an ‘enthusiastic consent’ standard is that they want to avoid situations like this: you say no, maybe another time, I’m very tired tonight, and the other person keeps on and on and on and on until finally, worn down and tired and feeling guilty and also a bit scared by their single-minded persistence and by their weight and upper body strength and the look in their eye, you give in and go through with it. But I don’t feel that this outweighs all the drawbacks of an enthusiastic consent standard.

I don’t know if you’re aware, but that particular passage seems to be seized upon and quoted by just about every one of your enemies. They’re desperately searching through the whole book for something really salacious and EWW, and there! phew! they’ve found it…but only in that one spot.

The reason I support affirmative consent, broadly interpreted, is that the “Well, they didn’t say I couldn’t” standard which many consider acceptable in matters sexual would be considered unacceptable just about anywhere else. If, one day around lunchtime, you show me your new fridge, and it’s full of delicious-looking jam tarts, and I eat the lot when your back is turned, “Well, you didn’t say I couldn’t, and anyway you were tempting me showing me those when I was hungry” is not considered a reasonable excuse. Or if we’re thinking about long-term sexual partnerships, suppose we are friends who are in the habit of borrowing each other’s clothes. One day I borrow your best outfit and you come home to find it isn’t there and you’re very annoyed with me. Well, I say, you didn’t say I couldn’t take it, and we’re always borrowing each other’s clothes and it’s never been a problem before. On any other day, you reply, it would have been fine, but it just so happened that today I needed that outfit because I had been called suddenly for a job interview. That’s why you should always ask.

On the other hand, we don’t need to draw up a legal contract if I want to eat one of your jam tarts. If you hand me one, or if I reach for one with a questioning look at you and you smile and nod, we’ve got the consent sorted out quickly and easily without a word being said. And if, having eaten one, I want another, or want to get into your fruit basket, well, yes, I do have to make sure that’s OK with you, and the same applies if we’re having sex and I want to switch to another kind of sex. But the process needn’t be unpleasant or time-consuming or a mood killer.

As you point out, though, this standard too has its holes. I can extract a “Yes, go ahead, eat all the tarts” from you by looming over you threateningly and punching my hand, but that, of course, is not real consent. That doesn’t mean affirmative consent doesn’t work. It works better than anything else, in my view. It’s just not foolproof.

The real test, of course, is: how do these things work in real life? As you say, a sensitive child-lover knows when consent has been given, and will not proceed if it hasn’t been. A nineteen-year-old interviewed by Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield told a touching story. When he was eleven, he made friends with a man, Ferdinand. They’d sleep naked together and he began to feel attracted to Ferdinand. One night they stroked each other and Ferdinand sucked his penis, giving him a ‘dry orgasm’. “When that happened such a strange feeling went all the way through me that I began to cry. I didn’t regret doing it, but the crying suddenly came up, and then Ferdinand comforted me and then he also began to cry. He even shouted out ‘What have I done?’ He was actually shocked. He was rather badly shocked that I was crying. And then we talked about it, and then there wasn’t a problem any more. After that the sexual contact went on quite naturally.”

One man interviewed for Lautmann’s Attraction to Children explained how he knew a particular boy wasn’t interested in sex: the boy didn’t want to share a bed, wanted to sleep clothed, kept the door shut and locked when he bathed, and did not respond well to the man’s arm around him. “A boy who likes it doesn’t turn his shoulder but instead relaxes, leans back and rests his head on it. The boy who doesn’t like it, on the other hand, moves away, and goes off into the distance.” Another: “I pull back immediately if I notice the other person doesn’t react to a particular touch…and I don’t do anything further.” A third: “I felt her thigh, and then she said ‘That tickles.’ She meant this in a negative sense. She’d only said, that tickles. But it didn’t take a lot of logic to figure out what she meant. Of course, she’d also said it real loud.” A fourth, a boy-lover: “If your hands are brushed away, your approach is already too crude…It’s crazy how you second-guess everything, much more than a person would normally have to reflect on it.” But, seemingly, an extra burden willingly assumed by the child-lover. Another Lautmann interviewee said he had an “Italian friend” whom he’d met when the boy was twelve, but first had sex with when he was fifteen. The man simply didn’t want to push it, even though this meant he “more or less missed” the boy’s “most beautiful three years”.

Lautmann writes, “At this point, I cannot resist making the following dig: A major portion of heterosexual men would do well to employ such carefully developed consent strategies with women.” Such carefulness does not, of course, preclude a spot of fun and games: “What she liked best was when I’d kiss her down there. As far as she was concerned, this could go on forever. When I’d give her a good-night kiss she’d say ‘That’s not all’, rocking her lower body up and down. A sort of wild hunt would often take place, when she’d say ‘Catch my pussy!’ Then I’d try to kiss her pussy as she would try to get away.”

All of this evidence has been amassed in the thirty-five years since you wrote that excerpt, and it’s all out there to be accessed. People don’t take it in because they don’t want to.

It always seems to come down to a fear of intimacy itself. The problem is great swathes of the public are still prudish or squeamish about sex. Much of this has its roots in religion, and indeed it often has overt religious expression still (astonishing, really, in the 21st century). Another root is feminism, or rather what it has become. Typically it is women, and there’s a strong female power-issue at work, but increasingly there seems to be a breed of men who frown on any type of sexual expression beyond the ‘noble’ confines of their own: alpha males at one end of the spectrum, eunuchs at the other, and both appear to be attaching themselves to feminism. Maybe they think they’re more likely to get laid, or maybe they’ve simply given up on it, I don’t know. It’s no coincidence that many of the scenarios picked on are man-on-girl, such as Coulthart has done here. People simply cannot get past the sexual imagery of a man and ‘poor little girl’, and he’s playing on that. The phrases he’s homed in on and taken out of context speak volumes. Perhaps navigate might have been a better choice of word, though, or even ‘mutually navigate’ to avoid the usual bigotry, since it’s obviously more about emotions than verbally qualifiable consent.

Navigate would have been vastly better for the interview, no question. I think negotiate was right for the book, though, given the full context. Trying to write in a way that it totally bullet-proof against deliberate misinterpretation is a sure fire way to end up with something as bland, vague and dull as the worst blather of politicians when they’re trying to be evasive.

People also can’t get past the imagery of old man, specifically, together with child. It’s always, “So you think it’s OK for dirty old men to…?” or “So you think it’s OK for a sixty-year-old to fiddle with a six-year-old?” The image of a twenty-year-old with a six-year-old wouldn’t pack the same punch, even though that’s just as illegal and, in most people’s view, just as wrong. There’s a basic disgust there, and also a horror at the sheer magnitude of the age gap.

I actually think that you did well, Tom – your frustration coming more from Coulthart’s slippery slickness and lawer’s tricks than from anything he said that challenged or undermined your arguments. You defended your positions coherently and resolutely, you did not cede to his weasel words and his enticements, you refused to let him get away with questions rendered dishonest through the use of value-laden words and other dishonest tricks.

Also note how whenever you decisively closed down his line of argument he’d slickly change the subject in such a manner that listeners would not notice that his points had been refuted, e.g. where you demonstrate both your capacity, when a child, to decide not to engage sexually with an adult (i.e. withhold consent), and the adult’s willingness to accept your refusal.

The fact that he had to use tricks (see how towards the end he slips in the word ‘intercourse’ into a discussion in which it had already been established that the consent being debated was for non-penetrative sex) and ignored your answers, whilst all you did was put forwards your positions, shows how weak the premises were for his position.

I’m no expert on such things, but maybe you could make a kind of ‘pre-emptive strike’ and get the un-edited version out before he gets his edited version out. You could upload your unedited recording of the interview onto Youtube, making sure that it is well tagged, so that it comes up on searches for ‘unedited’ ‘interview’ ‘Ross Coulthart’, ’60 minutes’, ‘Tom O’Carroll’, ‘paedophilia’ etc.

>’Viewers could be forgiven for thinking he was the one who “wants adults to be allowed to have sexual intercourse with children” ‘

I’ve gone on about this before. Many times. But it’s amazing how antis just assume that paedophilia is about ‘intercourse’.

I think that this comes down to projection on their part: they have so little respect (or ‘belief’!) for children’s sexuality that they can only imagine anyone wanting a child as a passive recipient for their penises.

Is it best to avoid using the word ‘sex’ in discussions on paedophilia and child sexuality? It has too many overtones of ‘intercourse’ and I find that most discussions with antis start off ‘tangled up’ because we’re using different meanings of the word ‘sex’.

The phrase ‘sensual intimacy’ (though a bit overly ‘rich’, a phrase a copy-writer might use to describe eating organic chocolate…) better conveys what happens in a good relationship between a child and an adult. And using that phrase with an Anti immediately wrong-foots them and obliges them to rethink their unquestioned assumptions.

Oh, and you were entirely right to refuse to elaborate his ‘little girl/knickers’ scenario – they’d have just cut out his questioning, done a bit of editing and presented it as ‘a paedophile describing how he seduces little girls’.

You are absolutely right that language is all important. By temperament, I much prefer to call a spade a spade; but that is no good if, when one says “spade”, what people hear is “blunt instrument” i.e. a murder weapon.

I hadn’t realized that you had given another on-camera interview. I assume that they came to you rather than you going to the land of Oz? Oh wait, I see now that you had posted about it earlier. Sorry, I missed that. And I see that you have (once again) forsworn future media engagements 🙂 Well, I do look forward to hearing it although you may forgive me if I don’t actually base another film on it 🙂 Although, who knows? I can’t wait to see what ABC actually decides to air.

The transcription of the film is really great news. Yes, you are able to do what I’ve never seemed able to which is to attract eager collaborators. Well done! And I look forward to reading it in the French, as well. I was reminded by one person, just today (who is deaf, apparently) that our spoken-word pieces need written transcriptions. So I would say that our film needs both English and French (and more?) subtitled versions.

I wouldn’t forgive you if you did! 🙂 Some hardy souls manage to be fluent and persuasive even in the face of hostile interviewing but I am not one of them. I think you probably need to have been brought up in a family where there is some really poisonous long-term sibling rivalry going on, with endless verbal fighting. That would give you years to toughen up emotionally and perfect the art of the rapier response!

The discussion of consent is ongoing and new aspects turn up. When i read Radical Case last year, i learned a lot about consent. However, i’m also aware that it was written some time ago. Sandfort, Brongersma and similar were written in different times under different circumstances. Taking them out of context and citing them as they were current research results is deceiving.

And i see the discussion turning from “giving informed consent” to “being traumatised retrospectively”. If one dissects retroactive traumatization, then it turns out to be hot air. Trauma happens in the moment. Later on one might get insight and be disappointed after a re-evaluation. A re-evaluation includes a comparison of what happened against a set of normative values, which also change.

Again, this ignores newer research results indicating that children have a keen sense for fairness. When children enter into a relationship of any kind with an adult, they get some demands fulfilled. Those re-evaluations tend to ignore those demands. Of course, when 2 humans meet, they have different mental frameworks and different expectations. But this does not prohibit a positive exchange. As heretic TOC writes nicely, consent is the result of the ongoing negotiation during the whole encounter. As such it can not be given beforehand.

Right now, the child is forced into a victim role and denied any acknowledgement of its benefits. When that “victim” re-evaluates the encounter, it sees only one side and is blind to the other.

Hi Samuel! Your observations are on the right lines, I think, but I will just take up what you say on trauma as it could be taken the wrong way:

>If one dissects retroactive traumatization, then it turns out to be hot air.

What you seem to be saying, judging by what follows, is that there is no real basis for retroactive traumatization. That is to say, there is no reason why the original sexual relationship, provided it is consensual, will ever be in itself the cause of harm, even in the long term. If that is what you are saying, I agree. Real long-term harm does result, though, from societal over-reaction.

>Trauma happens in the moment.

Yes, trauma happens in the moment when there are real grounds for it, as with rape: and the more violent it is, the greater the immediate trauma will be, along with (in many cases) long-lasting psychological harm. However, Susan Clancy did not call her book The Trauma Myth for nothing. She found, in her well conducted research, little evidence of trauma “in the moment” with uncoerced adult-child sexual encounters, or even when there had been an element of manipulation of a confused child (which of course I do not condone). But she did find serious anxieties and emotional difficulties arising later when those formerly consenting or compliant children were later told they had been abused and came to feel they must be damaged people.

You are right that we cannot simply assume that Sandfort’s findings can be cited as eternal truths. He would not get the same results now. Society has changed. In fact it would be impossible to conduct his kind of research now, in which he asked sexually active kids, while they were in a relationship with an adult, how they felt about it. This absence of current research opportunities is a disastrous loss. What work such as his can do, though, along with that of Kinsey and others, is shed light on longer-lasting human potentials that may be obscured by current moral panics.

I’m interested in the way ‘consent’ has migrated from its legal context to monopolize all inquiry into the ethics of sexual conduct. Outside of a courtroom, there are many terms/concepts within which such questions might be framed, in particular the idea of ‘assent’. Here is a summary of the difference between consent and assent:

Consent vs. Assent
The informed consent process when executed properly provides sufficient information about study procedures so that a potential participant can make a reasonable decision about participation, based on an understanding of the potential risks and anticipated benefits (if any) of the study. Informed consent is not a waiver of rights.

Individuals who do not have the authority to consent to participate in research must still provide their assent.

Consent Document
The CSUF IRB will review the consent document(s) for use in obtaining and documenting consent from study participants. Consent forms must adequately describe the study using language appropriate for the target audience. If relevant, the investigator will be asked to translate consent documents into the subject’s primary language after the English version of the consent form has received CSUF IRB approval. Both the English version and translated version are required prior to the CSUF IRB issuing an Approval Notice.

Assent Process
Assent is an active affirmation of a desire to participate and differs from consent which is recognized as being granted from an individual with the legal authority to do so. Even very young children or those with limited cognitive ability can assent and they can certainly indicate a desire not to participate, which must be honored. Assent should be administered in a manner that is easily understood by the potential participant (either written or verbal) and should be limited to a one-page format. Illustrations might be helpful and larger type makes it easier for some individuals to read.

The following additional information relates to minor participants but can be adapated accordingly for use with adult individuals wherein assent is necessary:

Assent from Children (45 CFR 46.408)
Assent from a minor must be obtained in a language that is understandable to him/her and which requires use of an age appropriate assent form (either verbal or written) instead of a consent form used to obtain permission from the minor’s parents(s) or guardian(s).

Assent is demonstrated by a child’s agreement to participate in research. In California, a child is a person who is under the age of 18 years (unless legally emancipated). It is required that the researcher make adequate provisions to solicit assent.

The CSUF IRB will review a description of the process and procedures for obtaining assent from the child. To determine whether the child is able to assent depends on the child’s age and maturity. If the child is considered to be capable of providing assent, whether or not assent is documented is also determined by the IRB. Generally, children are able to read and write to some extent by age 7. As such, documenting assent by having the child sign an assent form is usually a procedure that is incorporated for children age 7-17. When documentation is not required, the IRB requires that the investigator conduct the assent process through a verbal script and the IRB will review the script of what will be said during the verbal consent process. It is also recommended that investigators avoid such language as Your mom or dad said it is okay for you to participate since this language can be deemed coercive.

It’s obvious here that consent is very specifically a legal construct, as made explicit in the phrase age of consent. As a legal term, ‘consent’ neither implies nor depends upon its moral or psychological meanings, as denoted by the same term, and routine attempts to confound these distinct usages are simply deliberate falsehoods.

‘Assent’ implies participation and has a moral weight independent of ‘consent’. Consent requires assent and assent requires participation, but assent does not require consent and does not require legal authority.

A constraint on a person’s capacity to assent is a constraint on their autonomy, while a constraint on their capacity to consent is a constraint on their legal authority.

Legal authority is a bureaucratic and/or political status, not a moral value.

The part when they tried to catch you, Tom, is sensational, these people demonstrate their evil, know that pedophilia is not so evil after all, so try to catch us dishonestly. If they the Antis were right not need to resort to deception to destroy us. Antipeds are afraid … not for the fact that we are pedophiles, but that really know that we are right. It is the beginning of the end for them, they have tried to destroy us in every possible way … and they could not.

But you know Tom … The Empire Strikes Back.

And as Girl-lover I assure you that most of us would not do harm to a little girl… unless love in itself is harm.

“I assure you that most of us would not do harm to a little girl… unless love in itself is harm.”

You can only speak for yourself. Go to 8ch.net and read what many MAPS post on those boards. Guy posted to get revenge on their “cunt exgirl friend” (their words). So they post pictures and even personal details. They ask about adopting girls for sexual reasons. They want to treat girls like “sluts and whores”. The white supermacist want to rape brown girls. They want to slut shame “slutty girls”. Tell girls they slept with that they (the girls) will get in trouble for telling. They like CP where girls cry or show signs of pain. They like to abuse the trust of others and abuse the kida. They show girls CP to teach the how to please them. They post real and hardcore cp. They lie, groom, manipulate, force etc girls into sex for their selfish purposes. So you are a rarity. Rarity means that laws should not be changed to benefit you while children get sexuality abused more because most of the time MAPS have faux consider for children and only care about their sexual gratification. Children in the US grow up fine without having sex with adults plus have real issues to deal with. As a parent kids face 99 problems but not having sex with adults isn’t one of them. Most of you have a fantasy idea of kids. A fantasy that fits what you want kids to be not what kids actually are. You all can’t see kids past your sexual desires and really leave them to the non-MAPS to care for their real needs. You care only about a non-essential component and superficially care about their real needs. Reading your writing you only care about them if you are sexually attracted to them. Or if you perceive them to be sexual. You also only care about them when they are in your age of attraction( small window). Not saying MAPS are evil but you ignore or diminish sex abuse of children (one poster saying it is rare like 5%) as well as the risks involve and only concern is to fuck kids blinding you to anything else. It is like have a disability that makes it impossible to view kids as humans but rather sex objects for your pleasure.

>You can only speak for yourself. Go to 8ch.net and read what many MAPS post on those boards.

I think PM spoke for the overwhelming majority here. Go through all the comments (about 6,000 of them) in the three years this blog has been running and you won’t see many that express the bad attitude you are talking about – and there are very few posts that I have needed to reject as moderator because they are of that kind.

Yes, there are plenty of websites where people do express appalling thoughts about all sorts of things, including kids. What I suggest (based on academic research as to the personality profiles of those attracted to children) is that the impression you can get from the nastier side of the internet is unrepresentative. You can also find thousands of websites where MAPs (aka “kinds” because we generally are kind) express the sort of thinking you see here at H-TOC.

Here at H-TOC (and I feel I do speak for the kind community here) we do not believe in a free ride for those who want to rape or degrade anyone, including kids, especially kids.

Well, actually, there are plenty who sadly do not grow up so fine. Remember the slogan “Make love not war”? America has got it backwards: “Make war not love”. The U.S. has a big down on bodily intimacy for the young and is an extremely violent culture as we see from its gun mania and endless tragedies of high school kids and others going beserk doing mass killings.

But just as you might get a false impression by reading the words of some MAPs, so the impression that you’re likely to form by looking at the website you mentioned may also be misleading. You can’t assess prevalence in this way. Only a proper study could establish this.

“But most of all, where I need to think again, is with regard to what happens many years after, because people can be traumatised retrospectively.”

I seem to recall your saying that Margaux Fragoso’s “Tiger, Tiger” had led you to reconsider this question. Have you written about it in greater depth? If without a clear, complete resolution, even what aspects you’re sure about and what you’re not?